The Unspeakable Perk is an early-twentieth-century novel set in the fictional Caribbean republic of Caracuna, where a small cast of American visitors is caught between a Dutch blockade, a brewing revolution, and an outbreak of bubonic plague. Samuel Adams writes it as light romantic comedy with an undercurrent of real danger: a mountain hermit, a runaway heiress, a prickly Southern cavalier, and a hotel full of scheming diplomats all collide in a hot, red-tiled capital city. The book moves from a chance meeting on a cliff to street fighting, quarantine, and a final revelation about the strange scientist everyone calls the Beetle Man.
From the Mountain Rock to the Yellow Flag
The Man Behind the Rock
A man sits in a shaded niche of a mountain above Caracuna, hating the Caribbean Sea for separating him from the United States and wishing it would dry up so he could walk home. He comes to this spot daily for its cool air and water. Two man’s lengths above him, on the crest of the same rock, a girl has discovered a vantage point reached by a private side trail—made, unknown to her, by the very neighbor below. She loves the same sea he hates, content to gaze on the blue that divides her from home and from certain perplexities there. She means to follow the trail back to the city, though she may lose her way, and does not much care, since they would come out and fetch her.
A puff of wind lifts the man’s new panama hat from shade into sun and into the girl’s view. Taking it for the hat of a man she had maliciously eluded half an hour earlier, she calls “Boo!” A sharp exclamation answers; something metallic tinkles and slides beside the hat—enormous aluminum-mounted spectacles—and their owner scrambles after them on all fours. The girl’s assumptions collapse in two shocks: this is not the slender, black-haired Adonis she expected but a stocky, brownish-clad figure with a very blond head, and he gropes blindly, eyes squeezed shut with painful muscular tension. He finds the glasses, grunts, and rises; the girl steps back out of range. After a long silence he asks her to say it again—anything—with childlike content. She hopes she has not broken his glasses; he says she has not. She thought he was someone else; he answers that so he is, someone else than she thought, and wishes he were someone else besides himself, since then he would be somewhere other than this infernal nursery of revolution, fever, and trouble. She calls it one of the loveliest spots she has seen; she has been in Caracuna nearly a fortnight.
He admits he is out of the habit of being polite and begs her to keep talking or laughing. Her kind of human voice is what he wants: fourteen months ago he heard the last American girl speak American-girl language, and the one since rasped like a rheumatic phonograph and had brick-colored freckles. He refuses to stand up and be seen, fearing freckles and that one look might ruin his dream of her. He asks whether she is a tourist, and she calls how she got there her secret.
The Runaway’s Confession
He asks her to be honest: is she not pretty? She says she is as lovely as the dawn and claims long silken hair to her knees. He proposes a bribe of conversation for five hairs, if she can spare them—a voodoo charm requiring sprightly talk. She pulls the hairs, knots them, and at his instruction fastens a hairpin to the end and lets it down; he ties on orchids from his private garden beneath the rock—golden-brown bee orchids, “just your coloring,” which he knows from her hair and the gold flashes in her brown eyes—and she hauls them up. She declines to see the garden, saying one look at him chasing his spectacles satisfied her curiosity; he calls her a startled fawn. She considers confiding her awful secret like a dime novel, on condition they never meet and that if he recognizes her voice he must go away. He agrees, just a bit too cheerfully.
She is a runaway from home—Utica, New York—from trouble: three men, all of whom thought she ought to marry them, and everybody else agreed. She could not make up her mind, so she seized papa around the neck and ran away with him down here, where he is interested in mines and concessions. She almost wishes she had stayed home and married Bobby, a home boy she grew up with—more brother-and-sister, if he would let it be. Number two is Mr. Thomas Murray Smith, an unspoiled millionaire, not so serious and not so dangerously near forty. Number three, the nearest, followed her down: Preston Fairfax Fitzhugh Carroll, on the Hotel Kast register—more Southern than the South Pole, whose ancestors fought all the wars and owned all the negroes and married into all the first families of Virginia; she made him fall in love with her. He is good-looking, gallant, devoted, but prickly, and she would have to keep him and his pride out of trouble; only last week he declined to dine with the President of the Republic because someone said his excellency had a touch of the tar brush. The man warns he had better get out of the country before that gets back to headquarters; she says if Fitz thought there was danger he would stay forever, and he fears nothing except perhaps her. The man accuses her of being a shameless flirt; she denies it and demands he augur which suitor she should take. He says it is easy: none—because he prefers to think of her unmarried, more in character with her voice. She calls him a selfish pig and taunts him to enter the lists; he cries “Good Heavens, no!”—he has no time, being a busy scientist. She mocks him for scrambling like a doodle.
The Tarantula and the Wager
The girl turns amazed and amused eyes on a man who claims he is shy; she had thought it a joke. A yellow-breasted bird repeatedly asks “Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?” from its perch, and she translates for it that the man says he is shy, laughing until a palm thrush’s song is shamed. He retorts warmly that after stipulating they should be strangers, her behavior is forward. She counters that it is hardly pleasant, after opening her heart to a stranger, to have him forced on her as an acquaintance; a film of vexation wells in her eyes. He implores her not to cry, calling himself a bear, pig, scarab—anything she chooses. She says she is doing nothing; he says he likely would not know her again if he saw her, citing his glasses, and that he forgets easily, even voices. She orders him to take the glasses off so he can see her better; he protests, but she says she is more interesting than a scarab. She announces she is flirting with him, never having flirted with a scientific person before—one-sided, difficult, uphill work. His panicky directions are mostly drowned out. She threatens to cry if sent away; he agrees to talk, asking her age as the Chinese do, recalling a Chinese cook who lost his shirt studs playing fan-tan, and warning her against bullfights as dull and brutal. She teases him as an unprotected man with a conscienceless flirt.
He asks why she jumped; she says she slipped because an awful, red-eyed, scrambly fiend on stilts ran at her across the rock. He identifies it as a tarantula, denies they are deadly—“Unscientific nonsense”—and goes up with a stick to chase it off; she taunts him about flying from unknown perils to familiar dangers. The bird returns asking its question; she claims he says he dislikes her and wishes she would go home, her feelings hurt; he protests. He says he only thought she might go back on top of the rock and be a voice again, else he will go. He climbs the boulder in three jumps; his goggled face protrudes over the rim, preternaturally solemn and gnomish. She sits as if she had forgotten his existence. He says “Ahem!”; she retorts “Did you ring? Number, please.” He wishes he knew whether she laughs at him; she confirms she does, always. He reports he drove the tarantula into its trapdoor home and put a rock over it, appointing it guardian of the rock, instructed to bite anyone who comes except her. She says as soon as he is free of her regard he becomes quite human, but she will never come again; he says dismally he shall not hear her again unless echoes kept her voice.
The Laboratory Behind the Rock
Miss Brewster was gone from her perch when the man called out, and he climbed down, confirmed with a careful peek around the angle that she had vanished, and returned to his nook—where he nearly jumped out of his skin. Polly Brewster stood there smiling, informing him she was no devilkin and needn’t be fled from. He stammered; she teased him about another bashful fit and asked whether the bold, forward American minx had frightened him. He owned that she had startled him, then turned the tables by saying he had expected her sooner or later—he had known she would come if he pretended long enough not to want her. She called him a gay deceiver and asked whether he had known her in a former existence. He said only that he knew she wouldn’t stay up on the rock long. She declared herself angry, except that he hadn’t meant it when he said he never wanted to see her face again; he answered with a compliment, and she clapped her hands at his improvement under her tutelage, asking where his timidity had gone. He said he had forgotten it, and that as long as he didn’t think he was all right, he was; she had spoiled him.
She proposed a mild, impersonal subject: what he did under the rock in a parched land. He said he worked, and that it wasn’t parched—look on the other side. Half a dozen steps brought her around the farther angle, where a little pool lay hidden in shrubbery. He called it his outdoor laboratory; she called it a dreamery and asked to sit, joking about devilkins and elfkins as a silvered dragon-fly hovered and darted away. He called the dragon-fly one of his friends and specimens, saying he studied its methods of aviation with a view to practical use. She asked if he was an inventor and confessed she was crazy about aviation. Now at ease, he explained that the mosquito was the curse of the tropics—yellow fever, Chagres fever, other epidemics—and that the mosquito was a monoplane, its wings all on one plane. Its great natural enemy was the dragon-fly; since modern warfare taught that the monoplane’s most effective assailant was a biplane, breeding biplane dragon-flies in sufficient numbers might solve the mosquito problem cheaply. She began to doubt, but he went on dreamily that nature varied aviation: the pigeon was a Zeppelin, the sea urchin a balloon, the thistledown an “undirigible.” She accused him of making fun of her; he mildly asked what else she had done to him since they met. She said she was angry and would go home at once—then a second far-away plop settled the matter, and he said he would go too. She asked if the signal meant hurry up; he said it meant he was wanted, told her to go first, and asked when she would come again. She said not at all, then reversed herself: he must come and see her next, owing her two calls. He didn’t know; she asked if he was afraid, and he said “Rather.” She urged him to come to-morrow; he said no. Her invitations, issued like royal commands, had never been received so casually. With anyone else she would have dropped the matter, but he was a different species—not graceful or tactful, but honest. Asked why, he said he had something more important: work. She said he could work any time; he said he must eat and sleep sometimes. She asked if he was really that busy and said she was conscience-stricken over the time wasted for him; he said it wasn’t wasted, she had cheered him up. Would he not come to the city to be cheered up? He would when he got time. Perhaps she wouldn’t be at home; then he would wait. She laughed good-bye until his leisure day arrived, climbed the rock strongly and surely, and at the top called him “disciple of science,” asking if he could see her. He said not from there; she said good, she was “a Voice again,” so he needn’t be timid, and asked a question. He said he had answered a hundred already. Had he ever been in love? “With a woman?” he asked; she said yes, not with his musty science. He said no; she told him not to be violent and asked if he had ever been in love with anything. “Perhaps,” he said. With what? With what every man in the world is in love with once in his life—”An ideal.” Where did he keep it safe from the common gaze? He tethered it to his heart “with a single hair.” She said “Oh” twice, a little blankly, and silently wished she hadn’t asked. She warned that this was a peril to the scientific mind and asked what if his ideal should come true; he said comfortably, “It won’t,” which mitigated her regrets. His career, then, was safe from accident. He moved into the open; she called “Mr. Beetle Man,” and he looked up to see her chin cupped in her hand, regarding him thoughtfully. Suddenly she said she was not just a casual acquaintance, if he didn’t want her to be; he said heartily that was good, and he was glad she liked him better than at first.
White Lies and a Borrowed Four Dollars
The next exchange opened with the man asking whether Miss Brewster had missed him, then mentioning he had been busy three or four days. She indignantly denied missing him and mocked his conceit. He began to recall her saying she was sorry, but she cut him off, calling him a “beetle” and clarifying that she meant she was sorry not to see him when he called that morning. He said he had not come to call on her; he came to see her father, who was out from eleven on, and whose secretary repeatedly sent word so. She explained pityingly that a secretary tells white lies, since her father was a busy, important man naturally “out” to those whose business he did not know. The young man’s mouth flattened; he remarked that in other countries, however queer the people, ordinary human courtesies were observed, and one forgot that if one ever knew. Asked what he wanted of her father, he replied dryly, “to borrow four dollars.” She said he need not be angry, since her father’s time was valuable—to himself. He glanced toward the beggar, who was regarding the cathedral clock, and said he had not wholly wasted his time.
She magnanimously offered to get him an interview with her father; he crisply refused, saying he was not patient of unnecessary red tape. She was surprised, realizing that this man was not accustomed to being lightly regarded by other men, however busy or important; that his own concerns weighed as much to him as any magnate’s; and that man to man there would be no shyness or indecision in him. When she began that if it was important her father would be—he cut in that it was of no importance to him, but perhaps he could see someone else of her party. She offered herself; behind his disks she felt his glance read her, and the grimness at his mouth relaxed. He agreed, and she remarked that her father said she would have made a man of affairs. He then said she should be planning to leave the country. She bewailed that everyone wanted to drive her away, citing the railroad man Mr. Galpy, who offered special trains any time to get her out—which she called inhospitable. He answered that a jail is hospitable, but one does not stay in it when one can get out. She said if Caracuna were the jail and she the “one,” one might; she quite loved it there. He made a sharp gesture of annoyance and told her not to be childish. She retorted that he came down like Freedom from the mountain heights, unfurled warnings, complained of lost time, and it all amounted to their sailing away when the Dutch wouldn’t let them; she called him “beetlish.”
The Flea and the Fire
The hermit lays out the stakes with brutal clarity: Caracuna’s government does not believe in bubonic plague, and if Professor Pruyn declares it officially, he will be arrested inside twelve hours and will likely vanish, before or after death. Carroll asks what is to be done. Perk points to a brush fire burning on the hillside and proposes they steep themselves in its smoke until they choke, since the flea is the only agent of communication. Five minutes later they emerge soot-begrimed and streaming-eyed. Perk draws white gloves from his pocket, and Carroll notices his blistered, stripped hands—the hands of a man who fell into a fire or rowed a fifty-mile race. Carroll guesses he rowed out to the blockading Dutch warship; Perk nods. It was the night before, he was semi-officially expected, and a message from the consul came back by wireless. He tells Carroll because the party should be released within forty-eight hours, and someone must keep constant touch with Sherwen; they must get out before plague is officially declared. Carroll asks whether Perk will report the case. He will report all he knows, though he cannot report officially, not being a physician; when Dr. Pruyn comes it will be evidence for him. Any delay beyond twenty-four hours is risky. Perk says he will stay at his place in the mountains, remote enough to be safe.
The Face Behind the Goggles
Sitting by a tree, Perk pushes back and slips off his goggles. Carroll meets his eyes and undergoes a shock different in nature from Polly Brewster’s but carrying the same impression of the revealed face. Despite tradition and prejudice, Preston Fairfax Fitzhugh Carroll has sound underlying judgment and is at bottom frank and honorable; he believes the face is its own guaranty of honor and good faith. He blurts that he doesn’t believe the rotten club gossip about Perk. Perk pushes his glasses down, settles the white gloves, and rises to go. Carroll asks whether there is a woman up on the mountain with him. That, Perk says, is his own business. Carroll says Perk told Miss Brewster there wasn’t; Perk says he never told her that—she misunderstood. Carroll demands to know who the woman is; Perk says it is none of his concern. Carroll accuses him of letting Miss Brewster—and Perk cuts in: is Carroll engaged to marry her? No. Then Carroll has no authority to question him; but because of what Carroll did that day, Perk tells him he does not expect ever to see Miss Brewster again. Carroll insists her name has been connected with Perk’s and he intends to find out who the woman is by coming to see. Perk says he will be welcome, sketches a map on an envelope, warns him to keep to himself that evening and take a dilute carbolic bath.
The Wreath on the Blank Door
Carroll dines in his room, sends a note of excuse to Miss Brewster on plea of personal business, and slips into the city. Wandering toward the hills, he finds a familiar street and stops opposite the blank door, puzzled and fearing infection if he inquires. The door opens and the leather-skinned crone appears, eyes swollen, carrying a travesty of a wreath in whitish metal interwoven with her black mantilla as a substitute for crape, which she undertakes to hang on the door. A powerful, sullen-faced man with a scarred forehead and the insignia of civic office emerges and addresses her harshly; she pleads for permission to set up the tribute to her dead. The official snatches the wreath from her. Carroll’s hand falls on his shoulder; the man swings and sees a stranger of barely half his bulk addressing him in politely remonstrant tones. He shakes loose and throws the wreath in the crone’s face. Then he goes down under a swinging blow behind the ear. He leaps up and rushes; the foreigner meets him with right and left, and he lies still. Carroll hangs the wreath on the door, through which the terrified mourner has vanished, and returns to the Gran Hotel Kast, his emotions relieved by that moment of action.
The Legation Under Siege
The American Legation is comprehensively superior to the Gran Hotel Kast. From their arrival at noon the day after the British Minister’s warning, the refugees are comfortable and content, Miss Brewster having quietly taken over internal affairs and reigning, at Sherwen’s request, as generalissima. No disturbance marked the transfer; the crowds showed no hostility, so the Brewsters felt they were extorting hospitality on false pretenses. Sherwen asks them to stay put. Miss Polly protests that she wants to market; Sherwen says the market is the last place any of them should be seen, as that is where Urgante has been doing his work. Urgante is a wandering demagogue and cheap politician whose stock in trade is abuse of the Yankis, and somebody has been furnishing him money lately—the sole fuel to his oratory. Cluff guesses the bills smelled of sauerkraut; Sherwen admits they may have had a Hochwaldian origin but it would be difficult to prove. Carroll says the Hochwald Legation would not shed tears over a demonstration against them.
The Football Rush
The Unspeakable Perk descends from the balcony with superhuman agility—shooting past the girl horizontally, swinging from a neighboring tree branch to its trunk, and leaping to the ground. The mob fails to grasp the significance of the exploit, too astonished by the ape-like tree-man with protuberant eyes. He lands near Urgante, the flag bearer, and rushes him with a berserker yell; Urgante lifts the heavy staff, but the American dives head-first, and the leader crumples and rolls over the cobbles, the smirched flag flying from his grasp onto the farther sidewalk. Cluff yells “Football!” and rushes for the stairs, followed by Carroll, Sherwen, and Mr. Thatcher Brewster, cursing in a manner creditable to his patriotism but not to his record as an elder of the Pioneer Presbyterian Church of Utica, New York.
Perk rolls free, staggers up, and catches the flag; while the crowd is stunned, he edges along the curb hoping to reach the legation door, but the foe cuts him off. Followers lift the groaning, cursing Urgante, who spits at Perk and cries to his henchmen to kill the Yanki. Perkins sets his back to the wall, wraps the flag folds around the pole, reverses it, and clubs the staff. A knife is thrown; he ducks and it clatters down with a snapped blade. He catches it up and lance-thrusts a rushing attacker. More knives strike the wall. A voice—clear and sweet—calls, “To your left! The doorway! Get into the doorway, Mr. Beetle Man.” He surmises a small set-in door at right angles to the main entrance and edges along the wall, wondering what keeps the others, who are frantically wrestling with Sherwen’s reinforced bars. He darts into the narrow embrasure, safer from missiles but unable to swing his club; the peons close in. On her balcony the girl turns away and cries hopelessly for help, dreading the sound of a man trampled to death.
Instead comes ringing hoofs and yells of alarm: Von Plaanden charges his great horse through the crowd, swinging around beside the shallow doorway before which three Caracunans lie sprawled. He jerks out his sword, possibly mindful of his pictorial quality and the lovely American witness. A lusty Anglo-Saxon whoop sounds from the opposite direction: Galpy, the bounder, bounds up the slope with two fellow railroad men, flannel-clad and perspiring from cricket; cricket bats against bare legs are dissuasive. The downhill wing of the mob opens for them, leaving a path to the cavalryman, to whose side Perkins advances with brandished staff. Galpy asks, “Wot’s the merry game?”
The Hermit, the Heiress, and the Man Who Is Not What He Seems
Polly Brewster is the engine of the book. She is pretty, willful, and honest to a fault, a girl who has fled Utica and three suitors—Bobby, the millionaire Smith, and the touchy Virginian Carroll—only to find herself bored in a foreign port. Her voice is what first captivates the hermit on the rock, and her curiosity is what keeps pulling her back up the trail. Adams makes her a flirt who is also genuinely kind, and the novel’s comedy depends on her discovering that the man she teases as a “beetle” is more formidable than any of the polished men who court her.
The Unspeakable Perk himself is the book’s best invention. Behind the aluminum-mounted goggles and the brown-green clothes is a scientist who talks to a beggar to learn how the poor die, who studies dragonflies as a model for aviation, and who scrambles after his spectacles on all fours. His shyness is real, but so is his nerve: he dives headfirst at a flag-bearing demagogue, rows out to a Dutch warship under cover of night, and refuses to leave a plague-ridden island because his work is not finished. The novel’s central joke—and its central tenderness—is that the ridiculous figure on the mountain turns out to be the bravest and most principled person in Caracuna.
Around these two, Adams arranges a supporting cast that measures them. Preston Fairfax Fitzhugh Carroll is the Southern gentleman whose pride is both his honor and his blind spot; he cannot hit a man sitting down, and he cannot resist a fight he believes is right. Cluff the athlete, Galpy the railway man, Von Plaanden the gold-laced Hochwaldian, and Raimonda the handsome Caracunan all serve as foils, each with a code of his own. The legless beggar who orates in three languages and the leather-skinned crone with her tin wreath give the city its texture—poverty, gossip, and sudden violence just beneath the hotel’s fluted glass roof.
What the Novel Is Really About
For all its farce, the book keeps returning to the question of what a person owes to strangers. Perkins stays when he could leave; he tends a leper in secret because a law forbids it; he warns the Brewsters to flee and then arranges their escape. Carroll, by contrast, is all principle and no prudence, ready to thrash a man in a public square over a lady’s name. Adams sets the two against each other not to condemn the Southerner but to show two kinds of honor—one loud and traditional, one quiet and unsentimental—and to let Polly choose between them.
The novel is also a study in misreading. Everyone in Caracuna is wrong about someone: Polly thinks the Perk is a freak, Carroll thinks he is a coward, the diplomats think Dr. Pruyn is a rumor, and the whole city thinks a dead man is alive. The Dutch permit that reads “Dr. Pruyn and a woman” is taken for a wife, and a woman’s presence in the scientist’s house becomes a scandal. Adams builds his plot on the gap between what people see and what is true, and the goggles become the emblem of that gap—a screen that hides a face everyone has already judged.
Underneath the comedy runs a sober awareness of how fragile order is in a place like Caracuna. A blockade, a demagogue paid by a foreign legation, a plague the government refuses to admit—these are not comic materials, and Adams does not treat them as such. The riot outside the legation, with its knives and cobblestones and the great horse plunging through the crowd, is genuinely frightening. The book earns its happy ending by first making the danger real.
A Comedy of Masks That Still Reads
The Unspeakable Perk belongs to a tradition of American fiction that sent its heroes abroad to find themselves in hotter, messier countries, and its portrait of a Caribbean republic in turmoil carries the casual prejudices of its era alongside real affection for the place. What keeps it alive is the figure at its center: a scientist who would rather be bitten by a tarantula than make small talk, and who turns out to be the one person in Caracuna who tells the truth. Adams wrote a romance, but he also wrote a quiet argument for the value of the unglamorous, the patient, and the plain—and for the possibility that the strangest person in the room is the one worth trusting.
